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About the Project Thinking Sex in Transnational Times is a collaborative research project focused on the study and production of "sex" across different spaces, regions, epochs, epistemologies, and disciplines. The goal of this project is to chart new ground in Lesbian and Gay Studies, Area Studies (including American Studies), and Ethnic and Gender Studies. We are particularly interested in developing our thinking and research in two directions. First, we want to explore and assess the cross-regional and cross-cultural studies of sexuality that have been honed most sharply in new research attentive to transnational phenomena (global capital and multinational corporations, media conglomerates and non-governmental organizations, refugee movements and migration patterns, religion practices and missionary activism, tourism and sex work). Second, we want to establish an innovative, interdisciplinary forum concerned with the global dimensions of contemporary sexual discourses, practices, and histories. Our goal is to chart a transnational historiography (and geography) of sexual institutions, norms, and practices. We hope that this project will enable faculty and graduate students to assess the promise of new paradigms both for the study of sexuality across geo-political boundaries, and for the articulation of that study to processes of racialization, gendering, and the cultivation of uneven global/local class structures. This project is thus guided by the following series of questions: 1) What connections and divergences exist between queer studies and other historiographies of sexuality, including gay and lesbian histories? What kinds of spaces, divisions, and borders are produced by and productive of "western" histories of homo- and heterosexuality? 2) At the level of discursive practices, how does sexuality operate as a regime of discipline for the formation of citizens within modern secular Judeo-Christian civil society? What are the connections between sexual and racial divisions of space in the "west?" 3) What spaces of perversion and illegibility are created at the boundaries of the modern West, such as in colonial social formations, and within the interstices of civil society, such as the prison, the sanatorium, and military and SRO (single residence occupancy) housing? 4) How have epistemologies of sex, particularly within gay and lesbian, feminist and queer studies reproduced a dominant spatialization of sexual norms and freedoms? How do the latter correspond to imperialist and neo-colonialist modes of "global-thinking?" 5) What forms of knowledge, modes of inquiry, and deployments of sexuality are furnished when "other" spaces, contemporaneous with liberal modernity, ground the study of perverse sexualities? Co-PIs: Rick Bonus - Assistant Prof., American Ethnic Studies (UW Seattle) Michael Brown - Associate Prof., Geography (UW Seattle) Bruce Burgett - Associate Prof., American Studies (UW Bothell) Kate Cummings - Associate Prof., English (UW Seattle) Chandan Reddy - Assistant Prof., English (UW Seattle) Karina Walters - Associate Prof., Social Work (UW Seattle)  Thinking Sex in Transnational Times is
sponsored by the Simpson Center for the
Humanities, the Departments of English and Women Studies, the
Hilen Endowment in American Literature and Culture, and the Graduate Opportunities
and Minority Achievement Program.
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